Anyone want to read about pensions? Didn't think so. It is one of those things that makes you kind of queasy. Foreclosures. That's another one. You know they're out there. Maybe on your own block. But you can't fix them. So you just wait for them to do you collateral damage.

Jeanette Fields, for more than two decades the architecture columnist for Wednesday Journal, was interviewed recently by Matt Baron and VOP6 TV as she was one of 60 local seniors honored during Celebrating Seniors Week.

I am sitting here enraged by news that Whiteco, the Merrillville, Indiana-based company, is attempting to sell Whiteco, the butt-ugly apartment building on Harlem Avenue. At least I'm trying hard to be enraged. It feels like I should be. Enraged. Furious. Really mad. Certainly decidedly annoyed.

In my calendar at work I have a yellow sheet from a small legal pad clipped in the back. On it, in my mom's handwriting, are all the family birthdays, wedding anniversaries and a few other notable Haley milestones. She wrote it all down, at my request, after I had, once again, missed one of my siblings' big days.

Back in March of 2000, Gary Balling had just been hired, but hadn't yet started as executive director of Oak Park's park district. He wrote a letter to his future staff and attached it to a short questionnaire asking them to describe the highs and the lows of their experience on the job.

The purpose of Monday evening's sparsely attended Oak Park village board confab was for board members to hear the thoughts of citizens regarding economic development. The more immediate benefit, if they were listening, was for board members to hear each other's thoughts about economic development.

The nuances of the RIF: It is a fairly routine process, the springtime RIF-ing of teachers. It is a legal, contractual, logistical process in which a school district gives early warnings to specific teachers that they may not be hired back for the fall semester.

One day when I was a kid, I picked the Oak Leaves up off the dining room table and read a story that changed my perspective on life and my hometown, which previously had seemed pretty whole, though I was fairly certain I lived in the poor part of town, south of Madison.

Election Day dawns. It should not be 82 degrees on primary day in March. Something is wrong. Something more than Rick Santorum being a legitimate contender for the GOP nomination. No, the Bradford pear trees just outside our office windows on Oak Park Avenue should not be in bloom on March 19.

The VMA is inviolate. Pass the word. Impermeable, too. It is also immovable, impenetrable, indefatigable. And possibly inchoate, though I have to look that word up.